This captivating portrait by the leading late seventeenth and early eighteenth century court artist, Sir Godfrey Kneller, shows Kneller’s delicate and intimate approach to his female faces, and is very like his individual portrait drawings with their emphasis on sharp features and alluring eyes. Kneller dominates our understanding of British portraiture at the turn of the seventeenth century. With Van Dyck, Lely and Reynolds, his name has become synonymous with the visual interpretation of British history – not least because he painted almost every person of prominence in forty years of British public life. Every reigning British monarch from Charles II to George I sat to Kneller.